Drawing on literature on critical constructivism, historical institutionalism and philosophy of law, this chapter identifies that customary discursive narratives on the idea of “modern development” at the World Bank and the IMF, entail severe flaws that can only be grasped by suggesting a theoretical framework to address the sociological background, power structure, and the fundamental historical biographical periods of these organizations. In this approach, the task of defining the meaning of discursive interventions on the public debate must merge the role that settings, interests, cognitive abridgments, and overall perspectives overlap conflictively in asymmetric structures of authority. The attempt to present this framework is to make use of a theoretical standpoint from which narratives entrenched on normative interventions at the Bretton Woods Institutions can be grasped coherently in the public debate.
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After the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the overall expansion of the free market-economy into the former Iron Curtain countries, discussions over the future of contemporary structures of governance and political organization frequently avoided stressing its economic character. The increasing role of the markets and the burdens of the economic system over the political boundaries of contemporary societies, led to a distortion of institutional narratives that attempt to bring out political demands that continuously collide with trade imperatives (Rodrick, 2002) (Rodrik, 2001). In such settings, global institutions1 (North, 1991) formerly isolated from the public opinion due to their specialized character (Hall & Taylor, 1996, p. 6), have acquired a voice in politics in which systematic interventions create normative constructions followed by social systems at risk of being displaced to marginal roles in the global power politics (Park & Vetterlein, 2010) (Finnemore, 1994) (Finnemore & Barnett, 1999). In such settings, the Bretton Woods Institutions, acquired a decisive role, managing historical inconsistencies of the global monetary and trade regime of the prewar periods (Black., 1960, p. 267) (Eichengreen, 2008) (Eichengreen, 2004) (Lewis, 2011) (Chang, 2002). Although they were originally conceived to cover regulatory gaps emerged by the increasing economic fragmentation of the global society, their influence settled consistently political relations that some have called constitutional (Peters, 2011) (Cass, 2001). At this point, a compulsory question to address is: how should such normative constructions be interpreted theoretically? And furthermore, how has the meaning of these norms evolved historically?
The limitations of the institutional categories in encompassing structural flaws and international urgencies derived from the process of globalization, led to an erosion of the discursive sphere from which the norm of “modern development” built up. In the historical record of the World Bank or the IMF, such situation represented the existence of robust theoretical and political restrictions within which such norm nurtured semantically. Thus, the system evolved legitimizing discursively, crisis in which core and periphery nations shared burdens and responsibilities (Sachs., 1993) (Wade, 2003) (Stiglitz, 2003). It is along such limitations that a theoretical framework to explore discursive interventions of the norm of “modern development” at the Bretton Woods Institutions, can turn the discussion from the political to the academic realm. The main goal of this turn, I claim, is to set a distance from customary research on political science and international relations, avoiding the ideological gaps of the official publications of the World Bank, the IMF and the WTO, and stressing the asymmetric character of a structure of governance that has operated within this setting for almost seven decades.